Local W3C HTML5 Validator Server

Table of Contents

This tutorial shows you how to set up a local instance of the w3c html validator, including HTML5 validation support via a local instance of the Validator.nu HTML5 validator. The online w3 validator has strict limits and will ban you for some time if you validate to often. So if you for example have a local unit test to check a website you will get banned a lot. Which is understandable of course, it is a free service. They provide all source code plus it is in the debian repositories, it is dead simple to set up one yourself.

I've used Ubuntu 13.10 because that has the latest w3 test (1.3). If you use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and you want the latest version you can install the two packages (w3c-markup-validator and w3c-sgml-lib) from the raring repositories (13.04), that works just fine.

Contents

Installing required packages

Compiling / Installing HTML5 Validator.nu

Configuring the w3c-validator

Upstart script for the HTML5 validator

Installing required packages

This will install everything required for the w3 validator and for the HTML 5 one (that is Java). It will also pull down Apache. After the install finished you can reach your validator already at http://server.ext/w3c-validator. However, it is not yet configured for HTML5 validation, which is kinda required for todays web.

Compiling / Installing the HTML5 Validator.nu

The W3 validator itself does not do HTML5 validation. It does support using external services to do it, and we are going to do it with the HTML5 validator from http://validator.nu.

Create a folder:

mkdir /usr/share/html5-validator
cd /usr/share/html5-validator

Set the JAVA_HOME path.

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk

Clone the latest validator source:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/validator/build build

Start the build:

python build/build.py all

If you encounter a Java exception, run the build script again. I had to do it three times:

python build/build.py all

If it all works after a few tries, the validator runs at localhost:8888:

INFO::Started SocketConnector@0.0.0.0:8888

Kill it with CTRL+C and continue reading. We first configure the W3 validator and then create an upstart script for the Validator.nu one.

Configuring the w3c-validator

I need to validate hosts in private networks, so I changed the below option in /etc/w3c/validator.conf: